User:Synthetic Soul

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Revision as of 08:31, 30 January 2006 by Synthetic Soul (Talk | contribs)

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Personal

My name is Neil Popham. I live in the city of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

I am married to Lucy, and am the very proud father of two young girls called Tilly and Romy.

I am currently employed as a computer programmer, mainly working with ASP and SQL Server to create Internet-based business systems.

I first got involved with Hydrogen Audio after I decided to back up all my CDs. I hung around the forums for a while, asked a few questions, and have been lingering ever since.

Methodologies

I am currently using WavPack images with accompanying cuesheets to archive my CDs. Archives are stored on both DVD and a 300GB hardrive, which is not yet half full. I also store PAR2 parity data on the DVDs, which is created for each image individually. I've yet to see whether this is a good method.

I get very little time to actually listen to my music! The main opportunity I get is in the car where I have a MP3 CD player. Because of the noisey environment I encode my music to LAME -V5 --vbr-new, and find the quality perfectly adequate.

Contributions

My contributions have so far been quite minimal. I try to make up for this by answering as many of the easy questions as I can, so that the real stars can spend their time discussing the meaty questions. It also makes me look more knowledgeable than I am.

Tag and Wapet

Before using WavPack I used Monkey's Audio. In order for me to be able to automate my archiving process I found it necessary to adapt Case's Tag so that I could set tags from the contents of a text file - namely a cuesheet.

I'd never programmed any C(++) before and found the whole episode both immensely frustrating and incredibly satisfying.

I added the same functionality to Case's Wapet, as I thought it may be useful in the future.

There seemed little interest at the time, but both applications are now used by various other third party applications, such as FLACAttack and REACT.

foo_cuesheetcreator

foo_cuesheetcreator was originally created by Revision17 as a proof of concept.

I had been looking for a component to create cuesheets from a playlist for a while, and was amazed that I had not see it before. However there were some flaws with the component, e.g.: frames being calculated as 1/60th of a second rather than 1/75th and meta data tags being case sensitive, so I adapted it into a usable component.

Diskwriter With Cuesheet Support

I adapted Foobar2000 0.8.3's Diskwriter so that as well as merging tracks into one single file you could also choose to create an accompanying cuesheet generated using the playlist information.

Since 0.9 beta 6 the same functionality has been included in Foobar2000 0.9. Of course Peter's implementation has more functionality, e.g.: the automatic embedding of the cuesheet in files that support it, and a similar facility using chapters in MP4 files.

Links